Artists & Communities Host Site: Bates Dance Festival
Bates College
Lewiston, ME 04240
Web site: www.bates.edu/admin/offices/spsp/df/

Millennium Artist:
Liz Lerman
Choreographer and Dancer
Maryland
Web site: www.danceexchange.org/

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

On January 1, 2000, The Bates Dance Festival, Millennium Artist Liz Lerman, and a host of community residents in Eastport, Maine officially kicked off the project phase of Artists & Communities: America Creates for the Millennium.

Celebrating the dawn of the new Millennium, an estimated 300 people braved the cold and dark to watch the 'First Light' dance performance by 60 local residents and Liz Lerman Dance Exchange members. Dance Exchange Producing Director Jane Hirshberg recounted that "…our dance began a few minutes before the first rays of sunlight popped through the sky. The last gesture in our dance was one of reaching our hands up slowly, as if to help the sun lift itself up and shed its light."

"Just as our dance ended," Hirshberg said, "several seal swam into the harbor, a flock of gulls whirred overhead, and a school of herring swam by, creating quite a wonderful, natural stir of sounds. It couldn't have been more beautiful, and certainly the dawn was one of the most picturesque any of us had ever seen."

Choreographed by Millennium Artist Liz Lerman and Dance Exchange member Martha Wittman, the performance was based on stories collected from people in the community through storytelling and movement workshops mounted in Eastport since May 1999.

The Bates Dance Festival worked in consultation with the Maine Arts Commission and in collaboration with Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the Greater Eastport Area Chamber of Commerce to oversee a state-wide millennium project designed to bring diverse members of the Eastport, Deer Isle, and Lewiston communities together with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange to create participatory, on-site dances. Each community hosted Liz Lerman and members of Dance Exchange to determine how they viewed their community as a place of praise. The workshop process culminated in celebratory, public performances.

The public performances created through Lerman's participation in Artists & Communities became part of the Dance Exchange's national "Hallelujah" project. The "Hallelujah"project explored what various communities were "in praise of" - defining what they chose to celebrate in the new century.

MILLENNIUM ARTIST BIO

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, dancer, company director, writer, educator, and performance artist whose work has been commissioned by the Lincoln Center, American Dance Festival, BalletMet, and the Kennedy Center.